Notice the cobblestones beneath your feet — pulled from the old Skid Road and relaid here when the city closed this block to traffic in the 1970s. The square is anchored by four totem poles, carved by Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous artists, that tell stories from Tlingit and Coast Salish traditions. The cobblestones came from the original street bed, pulled up from the old Skid Road and relaid as a deliberate echo of the neighborhood's past.
The square sits across from the Occidental Hotel building, one of the grandest survivors of the post-fire rebuild. From here you can see Pioneer Square's full architectural vocabulary — arched windows, brick cornices, cast-iron columns — all from the decade between 1889 and 1900 when Seattle rebuilt itself from ash in stone. Occidental Square has anchored Pioneer Square through every phase: the artist colony of the 1970s, the sports-bar era of the 90s, and the current tech-adjacent revitalization.
The preservation district designation in 1970 was one of the first of its kind in the country — a community choosing to remember rather than redevelop.